A Study On The Formation And Significance Of ’Half Labor And Half Peasant’

In the process of urbanization and industrialization, peasants of central and westernChina start mass rural-urban migration and ‘half labor and half peasant’. This article usesthree typical villages in central China as examples to discuss the general type, theformation mechanism,the function and the significance to social order of ‘half labor andhalf peasant’, with a realistic goal to explain why the rural society which has large-scalemigration can maintain stable and orderly.Half labor and half peasant is a concept of part-time work in the agriculturaleconomics; while it is totally sociological in this article. It is a kind of structure of familyon intergenerational labor division. Based on this point, the author discusses how to formhalf labor and half peasant, how to keep it stable and how to develop it. The study showsthat the structure of half labor and half peasant is peasants’ strategy which uses the dualitywithin the family to adapt the macro urban-rural dualistic structure of employment. More,due to the support of the land system, it is stable enough to become a structure. Thisstructure turns to be a class inside the village，which interacts with other related classesthrough land transferring, and thus the village could maintain a dynamic equilibrium as awhole.The ‘half labor and half peasant’ is practically significant to the social order. Itensures the village reproduction in the realization of family reproduction. More, because ithas inherent possibility of breakthrough, the central and western rural societies have notgone through depressed or polarized; instead they tend an inherent progressive trend ofdevelopment. This trend is the vision of the development of the rural areas.